The present invention relates generally to aircraft passenger suite seating arrangements and suite dividers for enhancing or relaxing privacy between adjacent seated passengers, and more particularly, to horizontally translating suite dividers configured to stow to connect adjacent suites and deploy to separate adjacent suites as desired by passengers seated in the adjacent suites.
Airline carriers offering premium seating classes often configure their classes with individual passenger suites. Passenger suites are typically defined by partition walls that can be shared between longitudinally or laterally adjacent suites. Suites can be arranged into seating groups to form a center column and outboard columns, wherein columns can be separated by an aisle oriented parallel to the longitudinal axis of the aircraft.
While rows of economy class seats are more easily configured in a cabin layout, suites must be strategically arranged to provide the necessary seating density while maintaining the luxuries and feeling of open space that premium class passengers expect. In this regard, adjacent suites typically nest such that primary seat space is maximized while secondary spaces are minimized and/or shared between adjacent suites.
In some instances, suites can be arranged to nest such that longitudinally adjacent seats face toward one another while laterally adjacent seats face in the same direction, or vice versa. At certain times it may be desirable to provide complete privacy between longitudinally or laterally adjacent suites, while at other times it may be desirable to relax the degree of privacy between adjacent suites to allow passengers to converse and interact. In this regard, deployable partitions can be used to connect and separate passenger suites.
Conventional privacy partitions usually take the form of solid panels that deploy vertically or horizontally from within a permanent dividing wall. Solid panels are heavy and require large dedicated storage space in dividing walls to accommodate large panel sizes. Since large panels are difficult to stow, panel size is often limited. Solid panels also offer only two modes of privacy, i.e., stowed and deployed, and therefore are not capable of offering intermediate degrees of privacy.
Accordingly, what is needed are privacy solutions better than those found in the prior art in terms of stowage space requirements, weight, expandability to fill large spaces, ability to offer both full and intermediate degrees of privacy, etc.